How do I work with Sharepoint Blog sites

I looking to add sub-categories under Catorgories is that possible.
How would I limit the number of posts to appear on the main page.
Is it possible to have a list of all recents posts by title listed on the site for quick reference.

Categories are list items with one field (Title). In order to add sub-categories, you would have to modify the structure of the list. You can easily add a sub-category field to the list and modify your associated views to group on the Category field, but may run into problems elsewhere. For example, the Categories are listed individually in the Quick Launch menu. If you add many Categories and sub-Categories, the menu will get quite long. What you really want there is a TreeView of some sort, I think, but it may require some programming to do that.

You can limit the number of Posts displayed on the main page by modifying an existing or creating a new view for the Posts list, and then assigning that view to the ListView web part on the main page. When you create/modify the view, there is a section named Item Limit where you can specify the number of items to display.

To have a list of recent items on the main page, simply create a view for the Posts list that contains only the fields that you want to display, number of items to display, etc. Then create a new instance of the Posts list on the main page and assign that view.

I hope this helps. Perhaps someone else will suggest a better approach for your first question.

So I created a column called it sub-category, a single line of text.
Create a view name it Sub-Category, scroll down to Group by and did First Group by the column Title (in ascending order) Then group by the Column sub-category in ascending order) Is this correct.

I am unable to see it on the main page blog just the categories. Please help thanks.

Below is what I am using to create it.

Categories are list items with one field (Title). In order to add sub-categories, you would have to modify the structure of the list. You can easily add a sub-category field to the list and modify your associated views to group on the Category field

Couple of other things, everyone who add a comment would like to be anonymous. In addition, once we have the sub-categories in place, I would then to add them on the right side and only list the sub-categories post. See image.

Once you create a custom view based on the Groups Title and Sub-Category, you need to change the Lisview on the main page to use that view in order to see it. To do this, go to you main page, click on the down arrow in the right side of your title bar, and select Modify Web Part. When the Web Part panel appears, select the custom view from the pulldown and click OK.

In order to see the post, you have to click on the post itself. Thaat is how SharePoint works. What you probably want to do, if I understand this correctly, is to remove the hyperlinks from the Title and Sub-Categories.

Does this make sense? Once you have this working, let me know how you want to modify it further. I didn't understand from your second post what you are trying to do, but will study it some more.

What I am trying to do is create sub-categories under Categories in the Quick Launch area and also be able to add to sub-categories when needed, plus click the sub-category and it will open the post under that sub-category.

I apologize for not getting back to you very quickly. Real world stuff keeps getting in my way!

On some of your examples, I'm not sure what you are trying to accomplish, so I need to start over and review what we are doing. In your last example (Category-with-link.doc), you have Categories listed under Sub-categories, which is illogical (to me anyway). It should be Sub-categories listed under Categories.

In your previous example (Sub.doc), you asked to hide the words Title and Sub-categories. We can do that using CSS. It's just a matter of findiing the right class selector and setting the display property to None for that instance. This can be a little tricky as what we do may affect other web parts.

So, to review:

We take a standard blog site and modify the Category list to add a Sub-category field. You've done that, but I would suggest that you also change the Title column to read Category, which will make the examples and Listviews easier to understand. I would also make the Sub-category column a Required column, so that every blog post has both a Category and Sub-category.

Once we've done that, we still have several things to sort out.

1. We need to fix the menu on the main page to show Categories and Sub-categories in a logical fashion, which you appear to have already done in your Sub.doc example. Please explain how you did that so that I can make my site look the same.

2. We need to create additional custom views to display the information in the way that you want.
a. You wanted to limit the number of posts in the main view, so we did that by creating a modified view and setting the Limit field to the correct number.
b. You wanted to display a list of recent items on the main page. We can do that by creating another custom view and filtering for the most recent posts using Date value calculations.
c. You wanted Comments submissions to be anonymous. In order to make them truly anonymous, you have to enable Anonymous access on your site, which is another discussion entirely. You could modify that view to hide the commenter's name, but I'm not sure if that will suffice.
d. You wanted a list displayed on the main page of just the sub-categories, which we can do with a custom view. I question why this is necessary though as your menu will have both Categories and Sub-categories listed anyway.

It is very difficult to design and troubleshoot this way (for both of us) and I appreciate your patience in working through this. Please review what I have just written so that we are both in synch, and then we can address some of the remaining issues.

Sorry, I am travelling at the moment, and will be away for another week. I do not have access to my server while I'm travelling, so cannot do any testing until I get back. I will try to get to your document as soon as I can, but am on a boot camp training course so haven't much free time.

Good. I'm glad that you find this useful. I am working on the custom NewPost.aspx now, and am getting some great advice from the MSDN forum. Hopefully, I can get this working and start to wrap this up so that you can get some real work done ;-)

I attached a file just to show you what I have done and what the layout looks like, not sure if I have the list set-up correctly especially the look-up. When I create a new post and set he category and sub-category it works the only problem is when I click on them it does not take me to the post unless I click on the title.

Let me see if I understand this correctly, using your slides as an example.

On Main page (slide #1):
a) You have a main Posts view (in the middle) that displays the blogs selected from the relevant Category on the left. This is working correctly? Mine is slightly different in that I replaced the Categories web part on the left with Categories/Sub-categories, so I can select blog posts by Sub-category. Do you want to do this, or are you happy with using Categories only?

b) Recent Posts is working correctly.

c) Posts[2] is not working correctly, in that you want to be able to click on a Category or Sub-category and be able to view the associated posts in a separate page? If so, we'll need to create a custom View to do that, and also modify the Post[2] ListView Web Part. It seems to me that it would be better to display your Posts in one place on the main page, and control the display in one place through the Categories web part on the left. So you would add sub-categories as I have done, and modify it so that you can click on Categories or Sub-categories and display the relevant Posts. Mine already does that for Sub-categories, but not for Categories. If we did this, you could eliminate the Posts[2] web part altogether and make your user interface much easier to use. Does this sound reasonable?

When creating/editing Posts (slide #3):
a) Selection of Category and Sub-category is working OK?

I need to fix my SharePoint Server before I can do any further testing. The SQL log files consumed all of my disk space, and I haven't figured out why yet. As soon as I can get it running again, I will address these problems. I'll try to do this over the weekend if I can.

I did some testing, and do not believe that we can make the Category/Sub-category links work as you wish from the menu on the left. The reason is that the DataView Web Part for the menu provides a single column to the main Posts ListView web part to use as a filter. I currently have this set to provide the Sub-Category column. It cannot provide multiple columns.

The only way that I see to get around this would be to create a custom menu that used javascript to dynamically change the filter value. This would be extremely difficult, IMO.

I will document how I have the menu configured at the moment so that you can test it on your site, and will try to post that over the weekend.

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I haven't forgotten you but am at a loss as to how to move forward with this. It seems that we have hit a limitation of the technology with the menu problem. I don't know how you can control the Posts display by both Category and Sub-category without some heavy programming. I hate to leave you hanging, but this is beyond my current skillset, I think.

I've attached a picture of the custom menu, which I hope that you can reproduce. Please let me know if you get stuck with this.

- Did you add a DataForm Web Part to the left column?
- Did you set it to display the Category and Sub-Category columns?
- Did you set it to Group on Category?
- Did you set it to Sort on Sub-Category?
- Did you configure the connection to provide data to the Posts ListView on the Main Page?

If you've done all of that, it should be working. After that, we can do a few things to clean it up.
- Highlight and delete the Column Headers
- Highlight and delete the Field labels
- Drag the Sub-Categories column to reduce the width to 8 pixels

Please post a screenshot showing the entire current main page so that I can get an idea where you are at with this.

Sorry, I am not sure what I did wrong, i attached a doc of everthing that I have been doing, I hate to ask is it possible for you to modify the PPT that you sent me with the details steps on how you made the blog look like your main page. and I will need to delete the existing blog and start over.

It's OK, I am already writing a procedure to build the blog starting from fresh. I probably won't finish this until the weekend though.

You probably don't have to recreate the entire site. Just fix the Categories and Sub-Categories list definitions, and then re-do the DataForm Web Part (i.e. the menu) on the main page to point to the Sub-Categories List.

Sorry, my daughter is in the hospital, and we are travelling every day to see her, so I don't have much free time right now. I've attached the PowerPoint slides that I am working from in the hope that they will give you some idea what to do. They're not annotated in many cases though, as I am transferring these steps to a Word doc with more detail. I will get back to this when I can, but maybe you can figure this out on your own in the meantime.

You have to start by redefining the Lists. If that isn't exactly right, then everything else will not work. From your document, I see that you couldn't make the changes on slide #9 Posts List. We've got to figure out why you are experiencing trouble with this.

If you are getting a "Column already created" error, then the column wasn't deleted. Go back to the Posts list definition and try to delete the default Categories column. If you get an error at that point, let me know. Otherwise the column should go away. You can only create the new custom Category column once this is done.

I did some research on this, and figured out that this error is happening because there is already a site column named Category. I have several blog sites that I've created to test the various configurations that we've discussed, and I'm not sure at this point what I did to get around this previously. I need to clear out the test sites and rebuild from scratch just to make sure that I've captured the build in the correct order. I will repost the slide deck once I've validated every step, whuich I'm working on now.

In the last document that you posted, you also mentioned the Recent Posts listview. I suggest that we focus on the main blog Category/Sub-category requirement first and then address the Recent Posts once we're finished with that. Otherwise there are too many things changing at the same time which makes it difficult for me to troubleshoot.

I have a quick question for you regarding the customized nav. Every time I create a post it will appear on the main section which is correct. Once I click on another post thru out the site the category nav will stay the same for each post I click on, I will not see the old category nav sections, is that correct.

The navigation list (Categories/subcategories) should stay the same no matter what. When you click on a sub-category in the list, only the Posts that match that subcategory should be displayed in the main section.

Clicking on the Category should have no effect on what is displayed in the main window,only whether the subcategories are expanded/collapsed in the navigation list.

The reason for this is that the Posts Listview in the main section can only accept one connection, as far as I know. By default, it uses Category, but we changed it to Sub-category when we modifiied the interface. Does this make sense?

I can't include a screenshot as I am in the process of rebuilding the sample blog site. Sorry!

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